Who stole my laughter?

Whenever I tried to be humorous, I ended up like that yogi who claimed to have ascended the highest pedestal of wisdom. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” the yogi said to his chelas. A schoolboy took him seriously and asked, “What’s the orbital velocity of the moon?”

“What?” The yogi asked indignantly and gave a stern look to the father of the boy.

“Oh, you want something simpler?” The boy asked just as his father whisked him away.

The latest edition of Indispire throws a similar challenge in my face. “Look at life around you and write a post that makes everyone laugh,” it demands. And the accompanying hashtag is #laughter.  When I averted my gaze from it, hoping like a vainglorious yogi that some chela would whisk away the challenge, it came back with a bang and last night it disturbed my sleep like a moronic nightmare. “Where is your fidelity to Indispire?” The spectre in the nightmare sneered at me.

I expressed my helplessness, like anyone who experiences a nightmare, by writhing in my bed silently.

It was then that the spectre presented an array of yogis before me and asked, “Aren’t they enough for all the humour you want?”

The yogis had a wide variety of appearances. One wore a shining a waistcoat-jacket over his half-sleeved kurta, another wore a parody of the same dress over a very un-yogi mass of flesh that hanged loose from all over his body, yet another wore the usual saffron beneath his clean-shaven villainous mug. There were yogis and yoginis of various hues and shapes in that array and some of them had guns and bombs in their hands.

 The one who appeared like the chief yogi snarled at me and said that India was going to be a $5 trillion economy soon. Before I could wonder why he had to snarl even while giving a humorous promise, the saffron skinhead mimicked the promise with a $1 trillion economy for his fiefdom.

Cows marched on the highway in the meanwhile. One of the cows found a banana peel lying outside a garbage tank and started licking it. A skeleton of a boy rushed towards the cow, snatched the banana peel and started eating it.  All the yogis together rushed towards the boy. All I heard was a muffled cry. All I saw was the corpse of the boy lying beside the garbage dump. The yogis were marching on the highway promising dollars to those who stood on either side with admiration and veneration in their eyes.

I woke up, my body drenched with sweat.  I picked up the water jug and gulped down that precious liquid which was becoming a rare commodity in my country. “Who has stolen my laughter?” The little sparrow in my heart asked.